Sharp

Sharp grew up around a Presbyterian church founded in the 1870s and took its name from Dr. William Franklin Sharp, a physician in Davilla. Then it became a school district that swallowed its neighbors. In 1931 the Sharp district included Lilac, Duncan and Oakville. Friendship joined in 1948, Val Verde in 1949 and Tracy in 1956, and in 1960 all of them chose consolidation with Rockdale. The village itself stayed tiny: twenty-five people in 1933, a hundred by the early 1940s, sixty in 1952, and seventy-five from 1988 through 2000.

What the plaque says

Sharp A farming and ranching community, Sharp traces its origins to the years immediately after the Civil War when settlers, attracted by the fertile black soil, began arriving in this area. The first business, a store, opened in 1892. It was soon joined by a blacksmith shop and the Davis General Store in 1896. Cotton was the principal crop of the area, and a gin opened in 1896. When a post office was established here in 1901, the name Sharp was chosen to honor Dr. William F. Sharp, a physician in Davilla (8 mi. W). An annual reunion of Sharp residents began in 1978. (1987)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Milam County Courthouse and Jail — 13 mi
  Cameron's 1892 Renaissance Revival courthouse and the 1895 St. Louis-built jail beside it, now the county museum, are listed together on the National Register.
• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 26 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.

More markers nearby

• William Persky — 1.1 mi
• Urban Cemetery — 1.1 mi
• Lilac — 2.7 mi
• Apache Pass River Crossing — 4.4 mi